Describe the Night

Set in Russia over the course of 90 years, the Atlantic's new epic drama from Rajiv Joseph ('Guards at the Taj') traces the stories of seven men and women connected by history, myth, and conspiracy theories.
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In 1920, the Russian writer Isaac Babel wanders the countryside with the Red Cavalry. Seventy years later, a mysterious KGB agent spies on a woman in Dresden and falls in love. In 2010, an aircraft carrying most of the Polish government crashes in the Russian city of Smolensk.

"A glorious, difficult-to-describe work that searches for the truth amid many lies, melding fact and fiction in creating a wildly unpredictable, endlessly adventurous tale that is as historical as it is contemporary...A gorgeously ambitious play, continually challenging the audience with its unconventional twists and turns. Director Giovanna Sardelli brilliantly navigates through the multiple time periods...So how to succinctly describe 'Describe the Night'? Truthfully, it’s indescribable."
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"Part of the great fun comes from seeing how the stories intersect as the play shifts between different time periods and relationships. Joseph does a masterful job crafting rich characters whose tragedies and triumphs are immediately compelling...Director Giovanna Sardelli displays a skilled hand in keeping the many moving pieces flowing gracefully...Expertly cast...Joseph’s warnings about politics, corruption, and manipulation couldn’t be any more resonant right now."
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"A thrilling new play...The contemporary relevance is chilling...A cast of seven exceptional actors, playing multiple roles under the supple direction of Giovanna Sardelli...Gorgeously theatrical, profound, and engrossing. And funny, if you like mordant jokes about dead ducks and leech soup. It is a terrific challenge to keep track of the relationships and linked identities...'Describe the Night' is a provocation to thought, both philosophical and political."
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"We are drawn in, bit by bit, never really able to see the grandness of this structurally solid play until the final scene. And then it all comes together, shockingly. Maybe a bit too tidy, but the play’s intricate and finely woven plot outweighs the contrivance of the intertwined relationships, leaving us fully enthralled until the elegant ending...It is no lie to say how funny and touching, smart and engrossing, and powerfully exciting and engaging 'Describe the Night' is."
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“The kind of historical revisionism that is thrilling onstage, but deadly in government...Earnest performances are a key ingredient in the magical realism that Joseph and Sardelli impressively sustain for nearly three hours...An arresting production that often makes us feel like we're in a Russian theater...Much more than an engrossing tall tale...It heroically wrestles with the slippery nature of truth itself, and unnervingly demonstrates why its alternatives are so seductive.”
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"An ambitious and complex work...The story jumps around in time and place and challenges the audience to follow along. There are scenes that are quite dramatic, others that are very funny and a few that don’t have much impact but are necessary...While I found the play intellectually satisfying, it did not engage me fully at the emotional level. The characters seem more like pieces of a puzzle than individuals worthy of empathy. Nevertheless, it offers a stimulating theatrical experience.”
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“Joseph’s ambitious, epic, and ultimately memorable drama...Sometimes, you will be one step ahead of Joseph, and sometimes, you will be two steps behind. And yes, perhaps you won’t care. But the rewards for those who stick with the work are bountiful. Not only is Joseph’s ultimate solution to this Chinese Puzzle of a play both ingenious and surprising, you will find yourself heading into the night with a rejiggered outlook on the concept of ‘reality’.”
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“Without a doubt, Joseph knows how to tell a sprawling, convoluted tale that spans decades...Slowly and with great craftsmanship, over the course of three hours and many more scenes, Joseph puts the many disparate pieces together to create a broad panoramic portrait of totalitarianism...If that sounds dreary and painful in a Soviet sort of way, Joseph’s soap-opera tendencies make the story anything but...’Grand soap opera or great play, 'Describe the Night' is that rare must-see in the theater."
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“Joseph creates a weird tapestry of truth and lies in his new drama...This overwhelming saga asks hard questions on the relationships between government and media, citizens and dictators, and how people manage to live through decades of upheaval...The plot stretches credulity but in Joseph’s shadowy world, it doesn’t matter. This is a dreamscape of epic proportions enveloping theatergoers with Joseph’s storytelling magic as it stuns with unrelenting anger at authoritarian monsters.”
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“Dense and fascinating...A play about stories, one that begins in historical fact and spins outward...'Describe the Night' eels like a vital attempt to hold a mirror up to the former Soviet Union — in Joseph’s case, as an American playwright, a mirror in which we might also see ourselves...Intelligent, playful performances...The genius of ‘Describe the Night’ is its recognition of the intellectual overlap between Russia’s creators and its tyrants: both understand the power of story.”
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“Exquisitely acted by the cast and directed with a supple grace...The play is its own vivid, perfectly paced patchwork of memory, lies, and revelations. Raw confrontation and violence share the same orbit as flashes of magical realism...Sardelli and Joseph crisply marshal the play’s complex structure, immersing us in its contrasting eras, which flash up as guiding graphics on the back wall...The play uses much mirroring of past and present to subtle and powerful effect.”
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“A 'Russian fantasia' that aspires to the brilliance of 'Angels in America'...and sometimes brushes up against it...Directed with clarity and flair by Sardelli with a bravura cast who are all superb...The entire cast devours their roles with equal parts gusto and glee...It's complicated storytelling and some may find it too dry or too soulless for their taste...But be brave and take the plunge. Writing this provocative and imaginative deserves our attention and admiration.”
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"The play is almost three hours long, and whizzes by in jewel-like nuggets of high drama...The journey is magnetically held together by the superb performances of every member of the cast...Burstein moves us through time with ease, as Babel’s stories outlive their subjects and they themselves become reality...The script is peppered with piercing witticisms. Metaphors are thought provoking and amusing...'Describe the Night' unfolds with a focus on the topic of truth and power."
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"In his intimate yet sprawling new play, Joseph has taken some pieces of Russian history and spun them into a narrative tapestry that spans almost 100 years...Joseph weaves all of these strands together expertly, introducing unexpected connections along the way...Under the sure guidance of director Sardelli, 'Night' travels back and forth through time with ease...Phenomenal cast...A partly true and totally engaging tale that would hopefully make Isaac Babel himself proud."
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“'Describe the Night' is undoubtedly Joseph's most ambitious play. The play is epic, both in in terms of its length and scope...Joseph is a good enough storyteller to ensure that this is a unified and absorbing historic drama even though it jumps back and forth in time and setting...A top notch cast...If there's any weak spot in this otherwise smartly constructed and presented drama, it's in the final scene which works too hard to put everything into a neat package.”
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“’Describe the Night’ is a question for which there is no answer...Joseph plays connect-the-dots with historical facts and figures spanning 90 years that might – or might not – have any connection, and asks us to see a familiar face in the resulting picture...The use of such authentic and historically accurate events and characters imbue ‘Describe the Night’ with great plausibility...While it could have used some trimming, ‘Describe the Night’ is a compelling story."
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"All that meta-literary conceit might sound too clever by half. But director Giovanna Sardelli maintains a taut sense of intrigue for close to three hours and brings out the script’s skewed humour...The entire cast adopts a suitably bizarre style of acting...The play’s final scenes tie up all its historical loose ends a little too neatly, thereby weakening the story’s enigmatic power. But 'Describe the Night' still brings us on an enthrallingly warped ride through Russian history."
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"The ambition of Joseph’s work is stunning. The intricacies he creates by weaving together the stories of both historical and fictional characters is impressive. The play encapsulates the atmosphere of repression, terror, and truth twisting of Communist Russia and the desperation it engendered for those behind the Iron Curtain, while somehow managing to infuse it with wry humor. The story feels particularly poignant in this political environment."
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“Ambitious, pertinent, resonant, sometimes compelling but often confusing...One can see what Joseph is about here – erasing the boundaries of time...pushing the Stalinist era flush up against the current day...If the production doesn’t hold together as one would wish, you leave wanting to encourage the playwright to keep going with it — to paraphrase ‘Angels of America,’ a comparable but more lucid work of breadth and depth, intelligence and passion: Let the great rework begin.”
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“A fact-based epic drama of enormous scope...Rich, fascinating, bulging and unwieldy; Joseph weaves an interesting story, helped along by bravura performances...But while drama of this historic complexity can be highly rewarding, Joseph’s play does not quite succeed...We get a jigsaw-like evening in which you have many complete sections but can’t piece them together...Ambiguity in drama can be effective, but not when you lose your audience during the first act.”
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"Cryptic, lyrical, engrossing, if occasionally ponderous...What distinguishes Joseph’s work is his non-linear time line...It can get confusing—he’s not overly generous with clues—but it’s also intriguing...Sardelli’s direction is straightforward but just a little bit sluggish...Burstein and Grenier make perfect foils for each other, as both friends and foes...'Describe the Night' effectively summons up the Cold War era in a very character-driven way."
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"We'd be more intrigued if the people onstage were more engaging...Then again, playwriting of this breadth and intellectual interest doesn't come along every day...There is considerable satisfaction to be had as the various puzzle pieces click into place...Even when the play is taking its own sweet time, one can enjoy a cast that is adept at hopscotching across the decades...There are the seeds of a more powerful play inside 'Describe the Night,' but, still, it's a risky, rangy work."
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“Ambitiously complex…In a nearly three-hour play, it's impressive that Joseph keeps everything spinning almost to the very end. What's missing, though, is a sense that there's a center to the whirlwind. What idea, other than ‘fiction exists,’ is all this historical flotsam whizzing around?...Still, it’s a pleasure that someone has finally figured out to fully exploit Tina Benko's talents...'Let me tell you a story,' the ancient Yevgenia creaks...And as long as she's telling it, it’s riveting.”
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“A strange but often interesting play...The weaving of characters into the different periods can be confusing even though the actors are exceedingly good...Sardelli handles moments of intense conversation with skill...Still, there is something lacking in what the author has tried to do...One might yearn to learn more about Babel with less skipping around to make connections. Ideas clash, and the result is more of an uneasy mix than the searing look at what happened to Babel."
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“An overlong, overly wordy mash-up of history and invention...We get real and imagined events, braided together and spiraling over nearly a century of Russian history...It’s terribly difficult to describe it all, but suffice it to say that the work is ambitious. Terrifically ambitious, sprawling, overlong, overplotted, uneven, and filled with wonderful performances...But, unfortunately, it does not nourish the hungry theatergoer.”
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Don't see it if
don't think you can sit through a sophisticated, complicated thinker.

Also
I went back to see this play a second time. No one writes in this style anymore. So much now is 90 minutes no intermission, one story-line straight though. This is complicated and takes a while to grab you. I wasn't wowed, really, until it was close to over. The cumulative experience is profound. Often plays are driven by plot and sometimes characters and relationships. At times it seems like this play is theme driven. What's the difference between true and false in life and writing and politics? And, yes it's about cold war Russian, but you can't help but think about Trump. When friend ends up interrogating friend, he says, I tried to warn you about what's coming.... Read moreRead less

See it if
You want to see a fascinating historical drama that follows a compelling story over 90 years.

Don't see it if
You are looking for something light and don't want to think

Also
I enjoyed this play even more than I thought I would. The writing was brilliant, the acting was exceptional, and all the production elements from set to lighting and sound design were used cleverly and effectively. Don't be put off by the near 3-hour running time (like I almost was)...this play moves and you don't feel the time at all.... Read moreRead less

See it if
you enjoy historical dramas even if they are mixed with a pinch of fiction. A wonderful show-stealing performance by Tina Benko.

Don't see it if
you can't sit still for three hours. Or if you do not like historical plays not told in chronological order.

Also
A very ambitious work by Rajiv Joseph. Still needs some work, however. Danny Burstein tries his hardest to overcome an underwritten part. Zach Grenier is a bit over the top, but it, surprisingly, works. Great set design.... Read moreRead less

See it if
you're a fan of Rajiv Joseph's work, or you just want a night of epic theatre

Don't see it if
you don't have the patience for a 3 hour play or if you have no interest in Russian history

Also
I never thought I would be so captivated by a 3 hour show with two intermissions, but here we are. Rajiv Joseph masterfully weaves together a tale that holds you spellbound until the end. There are just enough callbacks without being overbearing, amazing monologues and dialogues, and honest, well-written characters that are incredibly believable. Despite taking place over 90 years, the topics are relevant even today, with profound revelations throughout.... Read moreRead less